For best results, training should be considered a full time job. One’s entire lifestyle must be directed towards this objective. This lifestyle will also require following the correct training program religiously over time.

All athletes are limited more by their minds more than their bodies

One needs to develop a winning attitude. One needs to combine physical fitness with mental fitness.

This chapter touches on a few mental opportunities for success:

• Motivation – Competitive cycling demands an inner drive to excel. Everything in your life must be focused on the goal
• Dreams, goals, and missions – high performance starts with a dream. This turns into a goal, and ultimately the mission. Are you willing to make any sacrifice, ride any number of miles, or do any workouts deemed beneficial to achieving the goal?
• Believe to achieve – there are bound to be setbacks. One needs to remain confident, patient and mentally tough to power through. Relive each day’s wins, big or small to boost self-confidence
• Mental toughness – when we’re at our limits, fatigue sets in, and the mind tries to make compromises. A fully committed rider gets through it
• Patience – success won’t come quickly. We can introduce incremental change, like: sleeping 30 minutes earlier each day, cutting out 10% of junk food from our diets, etc.
• Commitment and tenacity – there are moments where fatigue says to stop, but the fully commited and tenacious rider finds a way to keep going
• Consistency and routines – the mind and body like regular and standard schedules. Things like jobs, families, and other responsibilities may interfere
• Your high-performance team – surrounding each champion is a network of family, friends, teammates, coaches, etc.

This topic can get rather deep, so there is value in reading other books on the subject and speaking with other successful professionals from all walks of life.

By improving one’s mental approach to cycling, their training and racing will benefit greatly too.

Next: Chapter 2 – Physical performance
Chapter list: Chapter summaries

The Deutsches Museum is one of the largest museums I’ve been to. There were so many topics on technology that the museum had. They had the usual topics on flight, ship building, engines, etc., but they had even more exhibits on classical mechanics, electromagnetism, chemistry, nuclear physics, mining, semiconductors, computers, cartography, microsystems, space exploration, printing, etc.

There was even a cool demonstration of arc lightning.

The section of space exploration was quite interesting too, but it wasn’t as big as the exhibit at the Smithsonian Museum of Flight.

The clean room exhibit reminded me a little bit of the type of work I did during my internship at Bosch.

Of course in any exhibit on computers, there has to be a computer from Remington Rand.

Here is the experimental apparatus that was used to discover nuclear fission.

The stuff I looked at was only scratching the surface of the museum. I pretty much skipped entire sections like time keeping, wind turbines, bridge building, among other things. I was there for four hours too and I didn’t even look at any one section in a lot of detail. To see everything, one would have to spend days here.

Link to photo album here

The section about the robot factor is basically about DC motor selection.  All it does is do a power balance between the energy provided by the motor and the energy required to move the vehicle at a particular speed an acceleration.

http://www.societyofrobots.com/mechanics_dynamics.shtml